After seeing these words I immediately thought about a recent social issue in China. Since we were young, as males we were educated to be nice to women and to be a gentleman, and I have no problem with that. However, in society, this somehow leads to the consensus that men are responsible for paying for everything when it comes to relationships. Another issue is that when couples get married, a majority of places still have the tradition of the man’s family giving the woman’s family a large amount of money. With this background, many women in China use relationships to gain money. This has been a social issue for quite a while now, but recently a guy’s death brought this issue to the surface.
There is this boy who boosts other people’s accounts for a living. It was a tough job and he was one of the best in this industry. However, the salary was still not high and he had worked 14 hours straight for many years. He had a “girlfriend” who he had been dating online and they met in person a few times. That girl claimed she wanted to open up a shop, and the boy was very supportive and gave her money to do that. He believed that it was his responsibility to do so, and for many reasons, he transferred over 100,000 dollars (700,000 Chinese Yuan) to the girl and lived on a 1.5-dollar delivery of every meal. But when the boy decided to marry the girl, this girl was reluctant and then wanted to break up with the boy. The boy tried hard to make it work but the girl refused very firmly. The coy couldn’t take it so he jumped off a bridge and died. The girl showed no sadness or regret and a few days after that, she started posting Tiktok vids trying to bait other men into this.
This seems like it has nothing to do with these two words, but this event was so influential the government and the police had to come to investigate. The male society wanted this to be set as a scam, but the result of the investigation was that the girl was not guilty of any sort. There was an official police investigation post on this and it was full of biased words, trying to divert the people’s attention and lead the people’s fury toward the boy’s side, where his parents and sister wanted the whole society to know about this and leading cyber violence. But it also proved that everything the boy’s sister said was true. Also, many official news websites posted videos saying that the boy’s family wrongly accused the girl, but when the public found out about the inappropriate use of words, they deleted the video and changed the title. Everything that was official was leaning towards the girl. But there were some other cases before that were found by the people, one example was a girl and a boy broke up and the girl couldn’t take it and committed suicide. The boy did nothing wrong and there were no strange transactions or such, but the court judged that the boy’s family should give the girl’s family 200,000 Chinese Yuan because of “ethical issues”. Also, the majority of recently certified judges were women. Not being sexist but I don’t believe there is no correlation. This led me to wonder, is there truly justice even in the court of law? There was direct evidence showing the girl lying to get money and it wasn’t a scam? Where would the total loss of credibility lead to?
The picture is a balance tiped to one side, and on that side is a judge’s hammer. On the other side is the crowd protesting. If that is the only thing on the drawing it would be fine, because public opinion cannot replace law when it comes to judgement of cases. However this hammer has been manipulated. Then is this justice?